3rd Entry for Oct 15, 2010

These 15-minute poses finished my evening. I feel they have a better-than-average focus, and attribute that in part to having experimented/challenged myself earlier on in the session.

I have been tending to stay in my comfort zone when drawing, and have been working on smaller, incremental improvement.  `R & D' - Research and Development - is a vital part of the art process, and one that I have a bit more time now to allot to, having scaled back my work commitments and lifestyle a year and a half ago.

I was thinking a couple of days ago while walking home that there is another kind of `R & D' - Repetition and Deepening. By revisiting the same territory with an engaged mind, one can try to go just a % or two deeper than previously.  And the further one has gone beyond the basics, the steeper the curve to making further gains, and the more time it demands.  But then again, what I am calling `repetition and deepening' could be considered part of the `development' aspect of R & D: you regularly try new things, then you try to develop them. But old things can often be taken further, too.

Over the last few years, that deepening process has been a major focus. A good chunk of the work pursuing that is being posted on this blog  and before that on its Yahoo 360 predecessor.
Time will tell, but it seems that the next while will see a bit more investigation on the `new research' aspect of the equation - trying different media and supports, messing around with imagery, as well as a portion of time given over to just maintaining  my grounding in `straight-ahead' life drawing.

Partly, this derives out of a practical consideration: I feel like my drawing of people is as strong or stronger than ever, but the drawings of maximum sensitivity are being done on sheets of newsprint with Conte crayon. Which is a near-perfect marriage of paper and drawing material, but has next to zero archival value, and consequently a problematic, near non-existant commercial value. Any other choice of materials makes for a substantial rise in material costs.

Which would be okay if the results translated over, but I have generally found that other materials combinations I try mean sacrificing either the control, the fine-grain of shading marks, the suppleness, or the tonal range that converge happily when I use Conte crayon on newsprint. Maybe it is a matter of choosing which to sacrifice. But it would be much easier to see my way to using costlier paper if I could anticipate marks that I liked as much or better than what something impermanent creates. Instead, the shift to better papers has all but invariably resulted in a less satisfying texture. In my mind, it's that additional 5 or 10% : the extra sublety that is manifesting in the newsprint drawings is what lifts them into the category of really strong work. 

But I'm feeling that it is time to try to translate that quality into more commercially viable materials. If push comes to shove, I choose making really good work on junk materials for my own satisfaction over making more pedestrian work for sale. (That's kind of where I've been at for a while in doing all these studies.)
But practically, having more saleable pieces should allow for more work time, more space and more materials, and more control over subject matter.

There are some fundamental questions about process versus product, and the role of that in art, and of the need for art to be timeless. I could cheaply sell a study on newsprint that could be enjoyed for three or four years, but after that it would be appreciably aged. I have lots of other studies with which that could be replaced, and regularly selling a bunch inexpensively makes sense from my working standpoint, were there lots of people okay with buying big, temporary art.  But that is not how the art paradigm works.  Representational art is all tied up with permanence, and memorialising for posterity, and bigger-ticket art commerce is invested in permanence, for investment value. Making digital facsimiles could preserve images archivally, but then it wouldn't be a drawing any more.

And I'm not entirely sure how invested I am in the permanence of the images I make - i.e how much importance leaving a historical record has. The experience of making the work is where the lion's share of the joy lies for me. Once I've passed on, I don't reckon having my name in history books will matter too much. But in the middle years of my adult life, mortality and questions of legacy still seem like a distant concern. Ego is obviously part of the equation - I post these studies with my name attached for people to look at. They are not being done in complete seclusion, nor am I posting them anonymously. I feel they are interesting to look at, and having people viewing them completes one kind of creative circuit involving artist, model and viewer.

I'm interested to hear anyone else's thoughts on any of this...